Saying that Mars has an atmosphere, while true, is maybe a bit too generous. I could easily believe that it can't cool sufficiently. Besides, wearing big bulky suits here on Earth, even in cold weather, can give you overheating issues, and these ones would have to be very big and very bulky indeed to last for very long.

Many places in semi-rural USA don't have reliable 3G, so SMS is a good fallback.

Man am I the only person who thought mods ruined Tribes? More than any other game back in those days (which is saying something), it was freakin' impossible to find a server that wasn't running mods. I thought the game was pretty balanced and fun as-is when it came out, and the mods all felt like if you didn't dump a ton of hours into just playing online Tribes you wouldn't even know what was going on.

Oh man, people still play ET? I was addicted to that for a long time, got busy with work, then assumed it had long since died off. I might have go to back, I was an excellent hat removal specialist back in the day.

For one thing, on a bad day, it's a great reminder of why you keep bothering.

Besides, there's always sending out emails like "taking a vacation/sick day, my wife's not feeling well". I guess you could replace that with "my spouse" or just lie, but that's petty to have to do (and easy to forget). You could just not ever talk about your home life because it's nobody's business, but that's incredibly antisocial and not a good way to stay on good terms with your coworkers.

As stated in TFS, it is legal in an awful lot of states, and just because it's not "common" doesn't mean it's worth ignoring or accepting.

I'm happy to live in the tech hub of greater Seattle which is extremely friendly, and of course California and New York and such are also places where you can develop the assumption that this kind of discrimination is illegal everywhere. It's really not, yet. Also you seem to be under the impression that everyone has a friendly HR department. I don't know what the percentages are, but I'm willing to bet that one hell of a lot of people work for small companies where hiring and firing are pretty much their boss's uncontested jurisdiction.

We tech nerds are lucky to live in the world we do. Things are a lot worse in other industries, even within the US, and keeping up the public opinion and legislative fights matter.

I dunno, a big network buy-in to a new distribution model is definitely news in these parts, and "they still show commercials" is an informative summary telling you all that you really need to know.

Congratulations! They are now old enough for you to password protect your services.

Got a picture of your wife on your desk? Ever mention her in offhand conversation? Sure would be nice if gay people were free to do that too without being fired, which isn't true in a lot of places.

I misread the article and thought the printer and Sprout were the same thing, and under $2000. I was excited but I'm sad now.

I was going to agree that email was fine twenty years ago, but I do kind of like the way modern webmail displays threads even if it screws with the paradigm a bit. God, could they possibly have picked worse terminology for this new stuff though. I'll probably avoid it as long as I can.

Er, that's basically what they've been saying this whole time. Lots of reactionaries in the media are screaming that those very statements are lies and cover-ups.

When did this turn into the Fox News comments section?

For the audience this is aimed at (which isn't most slashdotters), definitely reassuring. Facebook has a *huge* base of people who just use it to keep in touch with family's lives, and the ability to mark Grandma as okay even if her internet is down is pretty appealing.

Also good for antisocial people, you can avoid being bothered by a flood of people who are just checking up.

1) It forces dealerships to price things locally and in competition with other dealerships, instead of based on the manufacturers' global strategies. Dick pricing moves are therefore local rather than global, prices aren't fixed everywhere across the country, sales actually happen. Also, a third-party dealership is more likely to want to sell you a used car. Manufacturer owned dealerships have a huge incentive to push new ones. If third-party dealerships had to compete with first-party ones, they would all get priced out of the new car market very quickly and likely go out of business, and then the used car market would suck.

Also, theoretically anyway, it should protect some smaller manufacturers. If a big manufacturer had the infrastructure to do direct sales to everyone, but a smaller manufacturer had worse infrastructure and had to go through dealerships, then the big manufacturer would take its lack of a middleman and price the smaller one out of business. The market doesn't seem to be working like that right now though.

Can't really answer 2).